Buried Deep

Somehow, I doubt that I am the only person who hears about concepts like "replacement theory" and White fears of being an oppressed minority and sees those as manifestations of fear that what European settlers and their American descendants visited upon the Native Americans and the Africans they imported as slave labor will be visited upon them. In the same way that "setting of accounts" is often used to refer to a working out of grudges and hostilities, there is a fear that a racial reckoning in the United States is going to be, first and foremost, about payback. And so there is a mindset that history can be prevented from repeating itself, only with the shoe being on the other foot.

I'd like to be surprised that we don't talk much about it, but I'm not. Airing the fear that non-White Americans are capable of holding intense grudges is seen as akin to an insult, since the holding of intense grudges is considered a culpable moral failing. The "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained" (to recall part of my favorite Thomas Jefferson quote) are considered ten thousand failures of a Christian duty to forgive and forget. Ten thousand failures to be better people than those who injured them.

And I suspect that this is part, if not nearly all, of the problem. If you take much of American history, from the attempts to exterminate the Native Americans, to the restrictions on immigration for people who were not from Western and Northern Europe, to the internment of the Japanese (and the subsequent looting of many of their possessions), to Jim Crow, and think of these things as little more than unfortunate results of human nature; then the world can easily devolve into two broad camps. Those who are strong enough to victimize others, and those who are going to be victimized. In this model, enlightenment is a fantasy that withers in the face of people looking out for their own interests, regardless of the costs to others. It creates a world in which power, and the ability to use it to dominate others, is the only thing that passes for safety.

American history has created a society in which it is somewhere between difficult and simply inconceivable for many people to feel safe. And I don't mean safe in the utopian sense that nothing bad ever happens to a person. I mean safe in the sense that it's possible to lower one's guard without leaving oneself open to atrocities at the hands of one's supposed countrymen. And the political system, primed as it is to find fears that can be deployed in get-out-the-vote efforts, maintains that sense of constant threat. Because it's almost always campaign season somewhere. And they are abetted in this by a media ecosystem that seeks to cater to people with a combination of mercurial attention spans and miserly financial instincts. And conflicts, especially those where sympathetic people come to unfortunate ends, draw people in.

I don't know what exactly President Franklin Roosevelt had in mind when he said that Americans had nothing to fear but fear itself. Maybe it's the precise situation that the nation has today, where the fears and anxieties of different groups of people feed on one another in a vicious cycle. Fear is more than a simple emotion. It's also a matter of how one views the world, and the people, around oneself. That gives it deeper roots than one might be inclined to credit it with.